Chapter 4 "Missing Saturn" Summary and Analysis

In language both clinically explicit and heartbreaking, Kay Jamison describes the seductive power of her disease to hold her in captivity. Admitting that she has a deeply ingrained part of her personality that denies the existence of a life-threatening disease, Jamison portrays her euphoria and giddiness when manic that she is reluctant to surrender to drugs. "How can a trip to the rings of Saturn compare to the dull stability of normality?" she asks rhetorically. Like alcoholics or addicts in the throes of their disease, she craves the highs that manic-depression can produce and ignores the horrific descent into darkness that always follows, with its constant threat of suicide.

Jamison says her struggle with lithium, the only drug that could save her sanity and life, began shortly after she started taking it in 1974. In less...